With immigration crackdowns taking place all over the US, the Trump administration is on pace to “shatter historic records” and deport nearly 600,000 immigrants by the end of his first year, according to the Department of Homeland Security. At this year’s Boston Globe Summit, civil rights advocates and scholars discussed the benefits that immigrants bring to America, and how these are now at risk, as the definition of being an “American” is changing.
The conversation addressed the latest headline in Trump’s continued immigration crackdown, with more than 200 people were arrested in Charlotte, North Carolina, this past weekend. The wide-sweeping raid came as part of an operation dubbed “Operation Charlotte’s Web,” that deployed Customs and Border Protection agents to the state for the first time.
“It’s not the America that I was made to believe in,” said panelist and At-Large City Councilor and President of the Boston City Council Ruthzee Louijeune. Mentioning that she has seen attempts from the administration to implement ideas from Project 2025 and white nationalism, erasing the multiracial democracy. “This hatred that we’re seeing towards… all immigrants in this country is hypocritical to who we are as a country,” she said.
Another panelist, Pawan Dhingra, chief equity and inclusion officer and professor at Amherst College, worries that the current administration is creating a single narrative of history.
“That does not do justice to what people have actually learned about how those countries came [to be].” Dhingra argued.
He explained that college campuses are one of the only places where people are encouraged to come together to discuss complex issues, allowing students to consider different points of view.
“This country, at its best, does that. We create those spaces,” he said.
Dhingra argued that international students contribute to creating that space.
“They make our own domestic students better in the process and vice versa,” He said.
International students in America have also contributed over $40 billion to the economy for 2024-2025, working nationwide, including the Boston area. But preliminary research estimated that there would be up to 150,000 fewer international students on campus this fall, resulting in a drop of $1.1 billion in international contributions to the economy. Dhingra attributes this to the delayed and heightened vetting system for student visa applicants, as well as the new $100,000 fee that employers must pay for H-1B visas, which allows non-citizens to work in the US.
“We’re limiting the prospects of [them] having jobs when they graduate. All we’re doing is hurting ourselves and our education, all the pathways we’re not creating, all the breakthroughs are not gonna happen,” he said
However, panelists said that concerns are not only impacting universities, their students, faculty, and staff; there’s also a chilling effect, not just on those who are most directly affected.
Iván Espinoza-Madrigal, the third member of the panel and executive director of Lawyers for Civil Rights, said that these changes will have “an impact on your access to a nurse, [and] on many different elements of our day-to-day lives”. In Massachusetts, an estimated 5,000 people with Temporary Protected Status (TPS), an interim work authorization for eligible migrants, work in nursing homes, and 15% of non-citizen healthcare workers are from TPS-eligible countries.
The White House and DHS officials regularly proclaim that detainees are “criminal illegal aliens.” Madrigal argues this rhetoric against TPS holders and other immigrants “provokes racism, [and] invites discrimination against these people and other spaces, and instead of talking about them in ways that emphasize their contributions.”
“[This creates] a sense of fear and dread, that you’re under intense scrutiny, that the specter of immigration and enforcement looms over you, and that at any moment, immigration will take action against you, even if you have documented status,” Madrigal said.
According to Councilor Louijeune, this has already affected day-to-day life for people in Boston through her role on the council since 2022. The impacts of these measures can be seen all the way in the sphere of education.
“In certain cities, where there’s a raid that people believe is going to happen, you see a precipitous drop in attendance by our students who need to be learning,” she said. “This is not normal, and we can’t accept it as such.”
Louijeune and Madrigal concluded the panel by urging leaders to address the broken immigration system and provide a pathway to citizenship, including shorter waiting times for family reunification and more efficient asylum claims.
The goal, they said, is realigning the immigration process to better meet the country’s economic needs, a step that Dhingra agrees will only bolster an America that “depends on them.”
